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Use Your Car To Power Your House
itwbennett writes "Nissan has developed a system that allows a vehicle to supply electricity to power a house during a power outage or shortage. A prototype of the charging system running on a Nissan Leaf electric car was unveiled in Japan on Tuesday. A two-way charging device that would typically convert the household electricity supply to a voltage suitable for charging the car's battery can be reversed to feed power back into the household circuit."
If the system is used regularly, it could also help cut energy bills. By charging the car overnight, when power demand is low and electricity is cheaper, the stored energy in the battery can be released in the daytime when electricity costs are higher.
Let's try this again...
If the system is used regularly, it could also help cut energy bills. By charging the car overnight, when power demand is low and electricity is cheaper, the power demand at night drastically increases above and beyond the power demand during the day, bringing the grid to its knees and driving up night time prices.
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This guy did it years ago with his Prius. Trouble is, his electric utility is so reliable that he never gets to use the feature!
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If backup generators were super efficient you'd be using them instead of paying for grid electricity. Efficiency isn't the point, keeping your food from spoiling during a power outage is.
This has been proposed before. It could become an essential ingredient in the overall energy strategy, buffering energy from erratic but renewable sources like wind and solar.
When the mains power is out (such as a storm or auto accident), the crews working on the problem will have the power for that grid shut off so that they can work safely. Any properly installed standby generator will have a solenoid that disconnects the house from the mains while the generator is supplying power. This is REQUIRED by national electrical code. Imagine the lineman's surprise when he touches wires that are disconnected from the generating station and SHOULD BE CARRYING NO CURRENT but are powered because some nimrod connected a standby system improperly. Not good.
Yes but why does it take as much energy as it takes to run your house for 2 days just to drive your all-electric car a few miles?
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I don't think efficiency is their primary goal here. It's chief purpose is to temporarily power a house during an outage. I suppose you could use it regularly but that seems kinda odd.
I'm curious about this though: from TFA: "..is sufficient to power an average Japanese home for about two days" - I wonder how that translates to the "average" US home (assuming there is such a thing).
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Lets try again:
If used regularly, the batteries in the leaf will need to be replaced a lot sooner than if this system wasn't used at all, which will add a significant price to the setup
It doesn't surprise me much as I have heard industry rumors of doing similar things with the smart grid and basically using EVs as a storage medium. Yes I work in this industry so /. here say seems to be correct on this.
As a side note I have also used a car to heat up the garage in the winter to work on it or just change oil. Basically you go and attach a vent hose (aluminum dryer vent works great) to your exhaust and route it out the door. Then start your vehicle and let it run for half an hour. In my uninsulated garage I can get the temp up near freezing from below zero (Fahrenheit). Once warm shut off the car and change your oil. If there is one thing a car engine is good at it is producing heat.
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If you have a car with an electric source it is convenient to be able to direct the electricity where it is needed. I don't need an emergency generator often enough to own one, but it would be nice to be able to use my car that way. If the car can also be powered with gasoline, then it becomes more reliable in a likely emergency because it sometimes takes days to repair storm damage. I'm not intending to use it long-term, so I don't care how many miles per millimeter of tectonic movement I might be getting, I'd just want to avoid having to eat everything in the freezer within two days. As tempting as that sometimes might sound.
The problem with generating electricity is that you can't (normally) store electricity -- so generating capacity is dimensioned for the peak load. A lot of excess capacity is available at night -- some of which you can't just shut off. It takes a long time to power up a coal/nuclear power plant. In mountainous regions the night excess is used e.g. to pump water uphill, back into a lake that is part of a hydroelectric plant.
Charging the car at night when rates are low makes sense, and running a few lightbulbs or a TV set doesn't use the amount of power you need for driving.
I did initially think 'Why on earth would you go to the trouble and inefficiency of this with an expensive electric car?' and then the penny dropped. It's in Japan, where they were having rolling brownouts due to the nuclear disaster and the loss of capacity, and are still under threat of blackouts over the summer.
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Dude, it's an electric car. It probably has close to 20KWh of storage. That means 20 killowatts for an hour or 1kW for 20 hours - you get the picture. The problem is that the leaf is a pure electric vehicle. Doing this with a Chevy Volt would be better since it could run on gas like a regular generator. There is some additional cost to make the charging system bidirectional, and there are certainly additional requirements on any system that can push power onto the grid. But yes, this is a neat trick that's not too hard to do once you've got a high power charger on an electric or hybrid car.
You have to keep in mind, the majority of our electricity use occurs during the day. Since power plants aren't things that you can just switch on and off on a whim, that means there's significant power generation at night that goes unused. Being able to tap that currently-wasted electrical potential and return it to the grid when it matters would allow us to run the grid more efficiently. Even if you ignore that possibility, it still means that a lot of EVs can be charged at night without disrupting the grid. Factor in the gradual uptake of EVs by consumers, and we are far from the catastrophic scenario you are envisioning.
Been doing this for years with an inverter, a regular gasoline vehicle, and a dropcord. Start car, connect inverter to battery, connect dropcord to inverter, run dropcord to location that needs electricity, plug in electrical device, eat cake. Yes, it turns your vehicle into a very inefficient generator. But when the power's out and you need to run a radio or TV to see if the tornado is heading your way, then maybe kw/gal doesn't really seem that important.
Maybe that whole 1/2mv^2 thing? One horsepower is about 750 watts. So even an 80hp car is cranking out 60,000 watts. That's a lot of lightbulbs.
A decent backup generator fairly efficient (still not as good as a combined cycle gas turbine) the cost factor is actually the fuel costs. If you really wanted you could go get a big stationary 2 stroke diesel similar to what they put in cargo ships or in 400 ton trucks which are close to 50% efficient. Backup generators that use natural gas are cheaper than diesel ones but coal power for the grid is still lower cost. Also costs increase because the fuel isn't purchased on an industrial scale.
Time to offend someone
by having everyone charge everything at night!
Because moving a big hunk of steel from A to B is harder than moving some heat from inside your fridge to the outside of the fridge. Just compare the size of gas tanks on a car versus a gasoline powered generator. That said, in an emergency scenario, I'd rather eat the food right away and save the energy for mobility to get to somewhere that has electricity.
Because:
-Your day-to-day house energy usage doesn't involve accelerating a ton of mass to 60-70 mph repeatedly
-As a corollary, your house is not having to constantly spend energy to fight air resistance to maintain a high velocity
-Your car is poorly insulated with very large windows meaning the reduced volume of air to climate control is offset by the inefficiencies of dealing with thermal and light energy outside the car (even on pretty hot days, your house A/C generally gets to cut off a lot, in a car, that compressor generally has to run constantly on moderately hot days to maintain the same comfort).
Though 24kWh lasting two days still seems *very* optimistic. lights and refrigerator only would be my guess, and you probably would want to leave that fridge closed as much as possible. A/C might be ok so lang as not overly aggressive (might get 5-8 hours of runtime to spread out across the two days).
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There was a time when people discussed the idea of having natural gas be the fuel for a small fuel cell system in homes, with the hydrolyzer being there at the house. Then, when you got home with your fuel cell car, you plugged in, fueled up, and then the fuel cell plant in your car would add to the power generation capability in the house. The idea was that when you're not home, you don't need as much power at your house. I was hoping that future would eventually happen, now we're just talking about batteries. Much less...sci-fi, cool, etc. Charge a battery so the battery can power a house later? Why not just...have battery powered LED lights for the short term emergencies (since that's all your car would cover well, anyway) instead of the extreme waste from the energy you'd bleed off during conversion and transmission?
You know, this would be really really useful here in Vietnam where the extraordinary growth rate coupled with communist era bureaucracies/corruption has left power supplies lagging far behind demand. I would dearly love a generator I could use to power my abode when the power goes out (typically in the hottest part of the day which in Vietnam is pretty hot!). This is probably true of a lot of developing countries.
Also in my previous career in the film industry having a powerful generator that is not only mobile but transports itself (and cargo and crew!) would be a godsend for shots not on the studio lot.
I'm curious about this though: from TFA: "..is sufficient to power an average Japanese home for about two days" - I wonder how that translates to the "average" US home (assuming there is such a thing)
about 15 minutes.
More if a few of the 55" plasma TVs are shut off.
Even more if homeowners realize that, with proper landscaping and insulation, it is possible maintain a very comfortable temperature with the windows open and air conditioner off even when it is 90 degrees outside.
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In many countries where electricity is expensive, even small factories buy and maintain their own diesel generators to save money.
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I live in the Cayman Islands so this could be useful here. When a huricane hits, there are no options to drive somewhere that has electricity.
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Sorry for posting AC.
I'm also worried about the extra charge/discharge cycles shortening the life of the car's battery. This is one instance where Top Gear actually has it right. Batteries are not the way forward for electric vehicles.
Obviously, as soon as day/night usage are the same, the difference in price disappears, and people will stop additional night time charging.
At the end, you'll get a much more stable power consumption which allows much more efficient power generation.
A couple years ago here in the U.S., a bad wind storm came through and knocked out all power in our city. It took several days for them to bring the grid back up for everyone again, but in the meantime, EVERYONE was without power. Including the gas stations. Unfortunately, I still had to get to work every day, and it got to the point that people could not do anything for lack of gasoline to get anywhere.
So, supposing this happens again, and I own an electric car, this is a great strategy for keeping the house up and running. But now my car is depleted. How do I get to work or go anywhere? Even if there was an electric re-charging station (and there's not), then there's a good chance they will out of power as well.
Something tells me this was not thought through too well.
When we had 2 hurricanes hit here in N Fla in 2005 I did it with my Nissan Altima and 2 400 watt inverters I got from a car stereo store. No generators to be found *anywhere*, I had myself my wife a 3 year old and a newborn to worry about.
One inverter kept the fridge and freezer going, the other ran a few flourescent shop lights and some low wattage fans.
No power for 10 days, had power back for a week, then no power again for 7 days. Didn't live in luxury, but we were mostly comfortable in the evenings and at night. Day time I came in to work, wife and kids went to the mall.
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then when I dont show up for work, I can use a power outage for being out all day.
first my alarm clock reset because of the power outage and I didn't get woke up on time, then my electric car was dead because it didn't get charged overnight and it was supplying power to my house.
With the windows open it doesn't matter much how good your insulation is.
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Though 24kWh lasting two days still seems *very* optimistic
According to my last electricity bill, I used 924kWh over six months, or around 5 per day. To use 24kWh in two days, you'd need more than double my electricity consumption. Given that I work from home (so have computers on and music playing most of the day), watch films on a projector (300W bulb), use a tumble dryer for all of my clothes and a dishwasher for all of my washing up, that seems insanely high.
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Actually, with proper insulation, you'd want the windows closed, otherwise all the hot outside air just blows in. I don't have AC in my house, and during hot summers it's quite a bit cooler inside than outside, provided I keep all windows closed.
This would be a dream come true for amateur filmmakers who need a power source for filming outdoors at night. Portable generators are either too noisy or too expensive. You can get an inverter for your car to supply 120V AC, which is a decent solution because cars aren't very noisy, but energy from a battery makes no noise at all, and sufficient energy for powering a house for a day certainly can handle 2000 watts of light for a night shoot. Amateur filmmakers normally have a day job, so they can afford a car like the Nissan Leaf... this is just an added benefit.
I hope they don't try to patent this. It already has been done years ago.
http://priups.com/
90% of homes do NOT have variable rate power. so you dont pay less at night. the losses involved with this setup are enough to offset any savings even if you had a variable rate billing based on time of day.
It's a net loss no matter how you look at it.
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I have seen a few writeups of people using their Prius as a whole-house UPS: http://www.priups.com/ http://hiwaay.net/~bzwilson/prius/priups.html
Or do what most electrical companies do, build a power reservoir.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludington_Pumped_Storage_Power_Plant
Problem is a LOT of power is lost in the process, Just like using the car battery or even a dedicated battery would.
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So I've been thinking about this a little and here's a couple of drawbacks I see:
I'm sure that some people may have a use for this technology. But it's a niche market at best.
OR get a fridge that is actually efficient to begin with. front door fridges are a very dumb design.
http://www.builditsolar.com/Projects/Conservation/chest_fridge.pdf
From over 6 years ago.... this setup would keep food cold for several days without power. and at 100 watts used per day (4.2WattHour) a very small computer UPS will keep it running for most of the outage.
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Yes but why does it take as much energy as it takes to run your house for 2 days just to drive your all-electric car a few miles?
The other answers are getting bogged down in wordiness and too many numbers.
Here's a simpler way to look at it, just look at the ratios of power output vs time duration.
The motor in your car is about ten to a hundred times bigger than the sum of the working electric motors in your house, right? Very roughly?
Given that, a chunk of energy runs your house about ten to a hundred times longer than it runs your car, right? Very roughly?
Makes sense to me...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
... if this technique could save you so much money by shifting your power consumption to off-peak hours and providing a good backup power source during outages, then the car just seems like an unnecessary middleman. why not just have the battery cell and power converter tucked away in your garage, happily charging at night and dispensing during the day and clicking on when the mains disappears?
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"vehicle to supply electricity to power a house during a power outage or shortage"
How often do those happen where you live? In Toronto, it's about once every decade, or less.
Given that this occurs less often than I would replace the car, the effect on lifetime would be effectively zero.
So then I would be perfectly happy to draw on my batteries when there's a blackout.
My bad, I thought the Leaf was a hybrid (like a Prius)! So you're right, having lots of Leafs (Leaves?) would make things worse not better. However that's for society as a whole which is usually the last thing on the average person's mind around here. :(
As far as the affordability goes though, the wealth distribution in Vietnam is very bad. Lots of motorbikes but also some Mercedes, Bentleys and Maybachs. I figure anyone whose stolen... I mean made enough money to afford a car can afford a Leaf.
"Even more if homeowners realize that, with proper landscaping and insulation, it is possible maintain a very comfortable temperature with the windows open and air conditioner off even when it is 90 degrees outside."
I had a home that we almost never ran the AC during the summer because it was properly built and engineered. IT was a Geodesic Dome home that had a row of windows at ground level on the windward side and a cupola at the peak of the dome with windows that would open. Even on 98 degree days it was 10 degrees cooler in the home. and that temperature differential coupled with moving air made it very comfortable even in 60% humidity.
The problem is most homes are designed by morons for a "look" and not for efficiency or even occupancy.
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What problem are we really trying to solve here! the car or the house?
Did they think anything about the fact that they are back feeding the grid? If you put power in the outlet that you are SUPPOSED to be getting power OUT of you will in effect be back feeding the entire grid unless you shut off the main breaker until power is restored. The power companies kind of frown on that and that is why NEC says you have to use a transfer switch so you can only get power from one source at a time. Thinking about this further isn't this built INTO a car so it won't do this? There must be......mustn't there?
90% of homes in which country?
I'm not sure where you live, but my night time electricity is *considerably* cheaper than my day rate.
Ha ha ha... that reminds me of this time... oh... 10 years ago. There was this guy at work that had just bought a 2kg block of cheese from Costco, and the power went out. He was so worried about his cheese spoiling that he sat down and ate the whole block of cheese. Couple hours later, the power came back on.
We did have an extended power outage due to a forest fire once where people were evacuated for 2 weeks. When they returned, they were told to move their fridges/freezers to the end of their driveways without opening them due to health concerns. Friends that were affected lost a lot of garden produce. The appliances were replaced by insurance/government assistance. Having an electric car tied to your home would have helped because I doubt it would have had the range to evacuate from the fire. As it was some of the towns along the evacuation route had to pack in generators to power the fuel pumps to pump fuel for people to evacuate.
I'm fortunate enough to live in a province with a government run power monopoly who's mandate is to provide stable power instead of cheap power. We rarely have power outages and pay $0.667/kWh to $0.962/kWh for power (depending on consumption) that's almost entirely generated by hydro. I guess hydro-electric dams must be able to quickly scale for demand because we do not have day/night rates.
Make that 10 minutes... remember that Americans cook their fish before eating it.
Mistake due to insufficient coffee consumption...
My rates are $0.0667/kWh to $0.0962/kWh.
Use your car to power your house, then charge your electric car from your house. Voila: free energy.
Depends on where you live. Where I live, 90% of homes have variable rate power.
Also, the difference in power generation efficiencies is quite big. Base load plants can run at 60% efficiency, while peak plants run at 30%. If enough people power their own house during the day, and charge during the night, you can leave the peak plants off-line. The charge/discharge efficiency of the battery is about 90%, combined with 60% efficient power generation results in 55% which is much better than 30%.
My car is my home, you insensitive dolt.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
That's fine except for one big issue: size. To get the same amount of space in a chest refrigerator as a conventional one would mean either you make it deep or long.
If it's deep, you run into issues with people not being able to reach to the bottom without leaning in, like one does with a current chest freezer, or you have to make it long to accommodate the same internal space.
Either way, this type of device would require nearly everyone to redo their kitchen to accommodate this new device as it will not fit in the space currently used by normal fridges.
I'm not saying this isn't a good idea, I'm merely pointing out why people would be resistant to using this type of fridge.
Also, what about the freezer portion? Nearly every fridge made has a separate freezer section. Adding that into the equation would, again, increase the overall size.
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Good idea if you have an electric car. But backup gas powered generators are a few hundred dollar to a couple of grand at your local hardware store.depending upon power output.
And according to my TED power meter, 12kWh is close to the MINIMUM my house has ever used in one day. Usually it's 30-40kWh in fair weather and 60-80kWh in summer with AC running. It's an old house with poor insulation, five active people using indoor lights all day, two fridges, and lots of cooking on the electric range and laundry in the electric dryer. We also do crazy things like paint the house in the summer which requires the AC be running with the windows open. Granted, if the power went out and we were running only the fridge and lighting it would go down considerably. But it will be much more practical to install ~3kW solar panel array than to rely on an electric car battery.
On the other hand, your household seems like a perfect candidate for this technology. Could be a lifesaver, especially if it means you could keep your business running during an outage.
"Also, what about the freezer portion? Nearly every fridge made has a separate freezer section. Adding that into the equation would, again, increase the overall size."
do what rich people already do.
1 fridge
1 freezer
And the size stays the same... just laying down, look at photos of chest freezers. and there are already homes that use these types of systems already. the only problem is that people use the top of the fridge as counterspace.
Honestly who cares about pushing wide adoption. if you really care about efficency or trying to be off grid you make sacrifices for traditional looks or operation for what you are interested in. It's why most people that care about efficiency will not live in the typical poorly designed home.
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I'm not sure where you live, but my night time electricity is *considerably* cheaper than my day rate.
I'm in the middle of the US, and last I checked most homes still have analog power meters that count the total usage for the month. Also, my bill shows total usage without differentiating between day and night.
Why build a huge single reservoir when you can have a lot of smaller distributed reservoirs?
In an emergency situation where I have the choice between lights, or no lights, I will be dragging cables to may car. Whether or not it's electric is immaterial.
- Dan.
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Even more if homeowners realize that, with proper landscaping and insulation, it is possible maintain a very comfortable temperature with the windows open and air conditioner off even when it is 90 degrees outside.
Nope, impossible here in Florida. The high temperatures coupled with the high humidity make not running the air conditioner not an option. Anyone who says otherwise is a fucking moron. You can get away with murder here in Central Florida, but not without an air conditioner.
seems like the obvious thing to do...leverage this gigantic battery sitting in your garage.
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If you just try to plug this into a wall socket, you could feed electricity out of your house into the power lines people are working on. Something that idiots installing home-center purchased generators have been known to do. This is why when power generators are properly installed, they use cutoffs and safety switches between the house and the main utility meter to prevent back feeding power into the grid when nothing is coming in. Anyone that does this should only run a line from the car to an outlet strip to power a few critical items, unless a proper system is installed and inspected to prevent that back-feed.
924kWh *total* or per month? Because I could absolutely believe 924kWh per month, it puts you just above the US average of 908kWh/month but over six months I find that VERY hard to believe as that's 1/6th the normal which would be like some of the very extreme solar powered off grid houses I've seen using DC appliances.
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Why not just...have battery powered LED lights for the short term emergencies (since that's all your car would cover well, anyway)
Uh, not quite.
My wife's prius generates about 60 horsepower.
conservative 60 hp * conservative 700 watts per hp / conservative 220 volts = sometime like 190 amps. Probably, with the help of the batteries, a short term surge of 400 amps would be possible.
Its an older house; I believe we only have 100 amp service. Technically I could run both my house and my neighbor's house across the driveway 100% full blast. In practice I don't think either of us own 100 amps of load; but then again running a car flat out full power for long periods of time is a bad idea.
Anyway in summary its quite realistic to run an entire house off a Prius. Not just some lights and the fridge....
Even my old saturn alternator supposedly is capable of a kilowatt of continuous sustained output, according to the high power ham radio guys. Thats... a lot of power.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Any way to turn my diesel x5 into a florida hurricane disaster energy center for a few hours each day??
U.S. here. I have a regular old meter with a spinning disc. I pay the same rate no matter what time of day (0.083 cents/kWh for the first 750 kWh, 0.067 cents/kWh thereafter.)
Only state I have lived with variable rate electricity was California. I've lived in 7 states along the east and west coast.
I used my truck to supply power for my house when Hurricane Isabel came through and knocked out the grid for the better part of a week. It makes sense, given the energy capacity of the battery in an electric vehicle, to consider them as an option for emergency backup power.
In an emergency situation where I have the choice between lights, or no lights, I will be dragging cables to may car. Whether or not it's electric is immaterial.
That's the thing... how much more are you spending to buy that electric car, and how does that compare against buying a $1000 electric generator to power your appliances? That's about what I spent on my current genny, which produces 7.5kW (got it on sale, regular price was $1400), and that's plenty for the sump pump, the freezer, the fridge, and the percolator. Our neighbours run their sump pump off our genny too, actually.
It's a really good idea if you're buying an electric car anyway, but buying an electric car specifically for this is horribly inefficient, and wasteful. If the battery really has enough juice to power the average home for 2 days, then as the OP said, either the car has a battery that's *way* larger than it needs to be, or the car is using *way* more electricity than it needs to. Or they're *way* underestimating how much power the average house uses... TFA says the battery is 28KWh... that's the equivalent of running my generator for 4 hours. Now, my generator produces about twice as much power as we actually need during a power failure (which is why we let the neighbours piggy back their sump pump off it), but if we were running the TV, the computers, the laundry, the air conditioner? There's absolutely no way that a 28KWh battery would provide enough juice to run the place for 2 days. 1 day, if we stretch it, but probably closer to 8 hours of normal daytime household load.
If you're getting your water from a well w/ an electric pump, when the power is out, so's your water.
It'd be a huge plus on why to choose a Nissan over another brand of car w/o said feature, and eliminates the need to store a generator, fuel for it, and have the special connection to make the generator able to power the house.
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Afaict at least here in the UK most homes have single rate power BUT dual rate is readilly available and if you are running large loads overnight (traditionally running storage and immersion heaters in an electrically heated house but charging an EV overnight would also fit the bill) then you would be pretty mad not to sign up for it.
Full on variable rate systems are being trialled but afaict are not yet widely deployed.
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Good point. Glad I don't live in Florida.
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If you had a hybrid -- of the type that uses an internal combustion engine only to run a generator to charge up its battery -- that would also be capable of feeding its power back into the household circuit, then you'd be able to power your house for even longer.
They have newer batteries coming out in the next 5-10 years that will store 10 times the power and charge/discharge 10-100 times faster. They already have working prototypes of full size batteries.
Lets see what kind of cycle life these have before we go around saying batteries are a dead end.
I don't know where people live that have variable rates for residential electrical power, but in upstate NY it doesn't exist. I have a spinning disk meter and the charges don't account for when power is used. If you have a business, things may be different.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
At first thought, this seems to be a good idea but precautions must be followed. How many people will use this system without making the necessary alterations to your house circuit box? I had an emergency power generator and made the needed changes to disconnect the house from the power companies lines when the generator is being used. Without these changes, the generator (or electric car) will push the electricity out to the power grid. What a lineman (repairing downed wires) considers to be a dead wire could be energized by your emergency generattor.
Like many things, it is only a good idea if certain precautions are taken.
Ask a friend if you can charge your car while visiting and then sneakily save on your electricity bill when you get home?
Even more if homeowners realize that, with proper landscaping and insulation, it is possible maintain a very comfortable temperature with the windows open and air conditioner off even when it is 90 degrees outside.
Nope, impossible here in Florida. The high temperatures coupled with the high humidity make not running the air conditioner not an option. Anyone who says otherwise is a fucking moron. You can get away with murder here in Central Florida, but not without an air conditioner.
That's because you insane people live in the Florida interior fit only for Republicans and other alligators and snakes. The coast is fine. Except of course in Hurricane season, but cinder block construction solves that little problem. If God had intended man to live in the interior regions of the deep south, he wouldn't have made it a giant swamp.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Plenty of US users buy Lister-style diesels for off-grid use.
Example only, there is much more info for the Googling:
http://www.centralmainediesel.com/stats/PRINTABLE/K09944.asp?page=K09944
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924kWh total. UK average is 3,084kWh/year, so this puts me at about 2/3 of the average. My appliances are all A rated for efficiency and all of my lights are CFLs, so that sounds about right. That people in the USA use six times as much as me doesn't surprise me greatly. The fact that you find it difficult to believe is part of the reason that the rest of the world regards you as insanely greedy and wasteful.
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The coast is fine
Which coast? On the west side here, it sure as hell isn't -- leaving your windows open just invites 99% humidity (except for that 1-2 hour window every afternoon where it reaches 100%, usually with lots of heavy thunder).
Also, from about Memorial day to Labor day, 90 degrees is the cooler end of what we get.
Gods, I hate this place...
It could also be:
The fact that you find it difficult to believe is part of the reason that the rest of the world regards you as their biggest customers
:)
You mean the large battery pack you charged from your house current can be used to return power to the house? Will wonders never cease?
This is one of those things that I thought was too obvious to deserve mention. I've ran systems that had UPS's in the 90's that used normal car batteries for storage. I'm a little surprised that this wasn't something that came with the car & charge point, instead of being touted as an advancement in technology after the car is on sale.
Guys, guys... This is a NISSAN leaf, not a Chevy Volt. This is a car developed for Japan and Europe, that just also happens to be for sale in California, tree-hugger capital of the world.
Japan *is* having an energy crisis, if you recall. Fukishima still isn't doing much and the power-grid there is suffering. Frankly, a slow-charging battery in a car that can be used as an emergency source for a power dump back into the grid during peak usage is a good idea for Japan, which isn't likely to be replacing their nuclear reactors.
And since Japan has no natural gas, no oil, no coal, and very few natural resources for energy production, solar, wind, batteries, geothermal, and other creative methods are going to have to be applied to make up for the gap once the nuclear energy production stops.
It's going to take Japan 20 years to overhaul everything that was affected by the tsunami. And by then, the price of oil will be so prohibitively expensive that those methods of energy production will be seen as non-viable. Japan has a much better long-term plan than the USA. While we make jokes or claim that the engineers haven't thought things through on Slashdot, it's much more likely that this is just a step towards Japan being energy independent, while we in the USA listen to the Tea Party bicker pointlessly while oil skyrockets and GM is still stamping out SUVs.
We're the ones who will feel stupid in just a few years.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
I had a home that we almost never ran the AC during the summer because it was properly built and engineered. IT was a Geodesic Dome home that had a row of windows at ground level on the windward side and a cupola at the peak of the dome with windows that would open. Even on 98 degree days it was 10 degrees cooler in the home. and that temperature differential coupled with moving air made it very comfortable even in 60% humidity.
Well, the GP said "with the windows open", which implies he has a magic house. I wager your house would quickly hit the outside temp if you had a few windows wide open.
I agree completely. But I doubt anyone is going to buy an electric car to use as a generator or power reservoir. I think the emphasis TFA failed to enunciate was "it could serve minimal power requirements for a time" Possibly as a means to make the car more attractive to purchase when any automobile could do that today. Hell add a PTO to a pickup and slap on a generator and you're set.
- Dan.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
That's the thing... how much more are you spending to buy that electric car, and how does that compare against buying a $1000 electric generator to power your appliances?
He mentioned 'electric or not'. I once figured out that for ~$300 and some machine work I could make a device to convert my truck into a generator and get ~50kw out of it.
Thing is, my truck's engine is generally going to be more efficient w/fewer emissions than tiny generators.
If the battery really has enough juice to power the average home for 2 days, then as the OP said, either the car has a battery that's *way* larger than it needs to be, or the car is using *way* more electricity than it needs
I use ~300kwh a month, which is ~10kwh/day, or about 2.4 days using the Leaf's 24kwh battery system. 24kwh@20 cents = $4.80 of electricity.
The 'standard' for EVs is around 3.6-3.8 miles per kwh, 86.4-91.2 miles per charge. I'd hardly call that excessive, and gives a cost of 5 cents per mile(using expensive electricity), when a car is closer to 13 cents(using $4 gas).
Your generator can theoretically make 180 kwh a day, but generators have to be sized for peak load, not average load. Odds are you're quite a bit under that most of the time.
but if we were running the TV, the computers, the laundry, the air conditioner?
Who says the 'typical Japanese home' runs all this stuff, especially during a power outage?
I don't read AC A human right
When the choice is between inefficiently-supplied electricity, or no electricity, which are you going to choose?
It seems odd to consider this as a reliable temporary power source as it would only be 100% operational if your car was home and fully charged when the power went out. How many Japanese people were home with fully charged cars when the tsunami/quake hit?
Battery storage systems aren't perfectly efficient, I think even the best commercial ones only get 90% That coupled with the losses from converting it back to 220V (from 12V) in most cases would effectively remove the "off peak" advantages to such a system in most residential cases. As a backup system it would probably be appropriate. There are attempts to do something like you are suggesting though. I have seen a prototype AC system that does much of what you suggest, it uses off peak power at night to cool a insulated tub of water. During the day the AC feeds its heat exchanger through the tub of cooled water instead of an air exchanger. The cost savings from off peak power and the efficiency increases from cooler night temperatures were showing significant cost savings last I heard. Though the question remains if the added complexity of the system was outweighed by the cost savings.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_storage_air_conditioning
Either the car takes too god damn much energy to run; it has too huge of a battery; or it can't power a whole house for long.
Cars DO use lots of energy.
That's why I laugh when people go about hunting down wall warts and turning off LCDs in sleep mode, but still drive a big SUV (and keep alternating between the brakes and accelerator ;) ).
That said, SUVs normally run on petroleum while the wall warts normally don't.
Sorry, 88F is not what I consider "comfortable,"and way to fucking hot to work effectively in. At 78F, my productivity drops noticeably (I know, because when I think "damned its hot in this office" I look ever and my thermostat is at 77-79F). Also, not everyone gets to ideally site their house on a generously sized lot on the properly sloped hill.
That said, if it meant keeping things running for a couple of days instead of a couple of hours, it's easy enough to open the windows, turn off the lights and other heat-generating appliances and just realize that the power's out and you're not going to get nearly as much done as you expected to. If I give up my quad-core PC and triple-monitor setup for my netbook I can burn about 1/40 of the electricity. The reason I don't do that every day is that even if I'm only 20% more efficient on the big screens, It costs me 25c a day extra in power for $240 in extra billings. Not a hard choice to make.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
When I read this, I thought about a large squirrel cage with the car running inside it.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Well, we do have our 3 days of winter when the weather drops down into the 50s.
The key thing is that this setup is actually very good for emergencies, specially in densely populated areas like urban Japan where you can't put easily a household generator like in small apartments.
From TFA:
The lithium ion batteries in a Leaf can story up to 24kWh (kilowatt hours) of electricity, which Nissan estimates is sufficient to power an average Japanese home for about two days. That means if the system was used for a few hours during the day, the car would still retain enough power to make trips.
Since supply is very tight in central and eastern Japan and they are forecasting that these zones will be facing power shortages up to the year 2014, this system is a very good fit to smooth the power demand. For example, for Tokyo Electric Company service area, the demand curve is in this link:
http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/forecast/html/index-e.html#graph1
The yellow band is the time that TEPCO is requesting customers to reduce their demand to prevent blackouts. If this system becomes widely used instead of seeing their demand drop below 49% at 3 am. and getting close to 100% at 8 pm. in normal circumstances with the help of customers they could increase the demand in the midnight hours and decrease their peak demand even if customers go with their normal energy consumption, and in the process achieve something similar to a smart grid without actually building it.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
Pro Tip
save the paint-the-house-with-the-AC-on party until after the power comes back on..
If you have a small child, they could climb in the freezer, and hand you stuff.
Doesn't this sound like a really good way to be stuck at home with no transportation during a power outage?
More and more homes, especially those outside of the midwest, much less outside the country, are getting the advanced meters. My parents have a switch on the water heater and air conditioner that allows the power company to turn it off during peak times, in exchange for a cut on their rate.
Same thing on the car charger should have the same effect.
I don't read AC A human right
That's only 200W per hour, I guess that's possible in an extremely temperate climate like the UK but not many places in the US are going to be able to do that. I have a very modest house by US standards (102m^2 living area for 4 people) and even if built to a completely modern design criteria it would use ~1,500kWh per year just for heating a cooling. That kind of construction cost five times what my house is worth, so even over a 40-50 year horizon it makes little economic sense to build to that kind of standard. Would I prefer my house be more efficient than it is? Certainly I would and almost every year I've lived in it I've done something to improve it but trying to get down to the level you've achieved just isn't practical here.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Thaaank you
If people are having a hard time grasping this, think about it this way. In an outage, a 20HP 12000 watt surge 10kw constant generator would power a moderate, or even somewhat large house quite comfortably (as long the user didn't get too crazy with high load items
could you imagine the performance of a even a small 4 cylinder sedan with only 20 HP?
You'll have to disassemble a UPS -- take the battery out of your UPS, and run lead wires from your battery to the corresponding positive and negative leads in your UPS. Voila.
Japan never used to have power outages to speak of, but in the wake of the tsunami and Fukushima Dai-ichi being taken offline, outages are heavily on the mind of the average Japanese citizen. They had a ton of blackouts in March, and the Tokyo area in particular has been engaging in a ton of power-saving measures; the article from the summary even mentions a few (dimming subway station lights, to draw less power, for instance). Given that everyone's looking for ways to reduce their draw on the power grid at peak times, I'm not surprised that Nissan is looking into this possibility.
--Rachel
do what rich people already do.
1 fridge
1 freezer
I believe you mean lower middle class. Upper middle class often have two or three fridges, and rich people have walk-in fridges with an even colder walk-in freezer (and several smaller fridges scattered around the property).
But if you teach your child that climbing into the place where the ice cream and ice-ee pops are kept is normal, then you'd better lock that thing well.
"This looks stupidly inefficient. Either the car takes too god damn much energy to run; it has too huge of a battery; or it can't power a whole house for long."
From the description:
" supply electricity to power a house during a power outage or shortage."
Wow you didn't even get past the first sentence! This isn't designed to power your house for life, it's for an blackout, when a summer storm just knocked out power and it's 100 degrees out and you don't have a $500+ 7000w gas generator laying around. Your car engine is far more powerful than any gas generator and it has gas tank much larger than generators, problem is you can't power your house with the engine on idle, it needs to be revved up a bit, and leaving your car outside revved up for hours risks it being stolen and is hard on the engine unless you know exactly how high the RPMs should be.
This is not a new idea, this guy did it with his Prius in 2009, but I'm glad a manufacture is finally designing a car that can function as a generator rather than the "backyard mechanics" method consumers had to use in the past.
Unfortunately they're designing this for the Nissan Leaf which is an electric vehicle with no gas engine so when the battery is dead on your Leaf from powering your house in a blackout you now have no power and no method of transportation. Not smart.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Personally, I just leave them in there. It's like having having a personal food assistant, because they know where everything is. Just last night he handed me some frozen steaks from the bottom of the chest that I forgot I even had.
Srsly u guys. U guys, srsly.
Hint: it doesn't have to be YOUR HOUSE that you're supporting. How many cars are in areas of Japan that were unaffected by the tsunami? How many of those owners would have charged up, driven a little closer to the region, and donated the remainder of their charge to help their neighbors? The elders in Japan once scoffed at the current generation of Japanese youth as lazy and disconnected with society-- until they came by the thousands to offer their sweat and tears for the Fukushima region.
[
"and rich people have walk-in fridges with an even colder walk-in freezer"
Hmm, so I must be lower lower class as I only have a 1900 sq foot home with 1 fridge and 1 small cube freezer.
And the rich people homes that cost $12,000,000 that I install whole house audio, real theaters, lighting control, and automation only have 1 SubZero standing freezer and a single standing Fridge as well... Sometimes they have a small fridge unit in the bar, garage and near the theater... Most of the time the theater has a Post Mix pop machine and a kegerator.
So the guy that makes $690,000 a year and has a $12,000,000 home is lower middle class? OR, you know absolutely nothing about what rich people have in their homes.
I have NEVER seen a walk in fridge or freezer at a rich persons home. and I have done work for one of the top 30 richest men in the world as well as several thousand of the poor plebes that have net worths that are only in the 9 digit range... The guy who had 5 Fararri's and a Porsche 911GT2 did not have a walk in fridge or freezer anywhere on his 2500 acre estate. He had 5 Segways to ride in the tunnel from the house to the garage if he did not want his chauffeur to bring a car around. The man has a Helipad with a bell ranger on it.
Still no walk in fridge or Freezer... Where do you get the outlandish idea that rich people have a resturant in their home?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
"1 day, if we stretch it, but probably closer to 8 hours of normal daytime household load."
I read that too, you're right, this system is not adequate, and after 8 hours the car is dead because there is no gas engine in the Nissan Leaf to charge up the battery again.
This seems like a really bad idea, I'd rather they just put 7kw inverter in a car with a switch telling the engine to rev up enough to produce 7k of power with a larger alternator. An ambulance alternator produces 300amps at 14v, about 4.2kw. That's enough to run a 12,000 BTU (1 ton) A/C, a fridge, some lights (preferably florescent) and a computer.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
28KWh... that's the equivalent of running my generator for 4 hours. Now, my generator produces about twice as much power as we actually need during a power failure (which is why we let the neighbours piggy back their sump pump off it), but if we were running the TV, the computers, the laundry, the air conditioner? There's absolutely no way that a 28KWh battery would provide enough juice to run the place for 2 days. 1 day, if we stretch it, but probably closer to 8 hours of normal daytime household load.
I realise that my case may be atypical, like many geeks I like efficiency so most of our lights are either LED or compact fluorescent lamps. However we use about 8 kW a day in the summer (when not using the washing machine) and about 11 a day in the winter. Washing days push us up to about 12 to 15 kW a day.
Weekly consumption is between 55kWh and 70kWh for summer and up to 85+kWh in winter.
We would use less but my wife likes light fittings that look nice but require multiple lamps.
This is for a family of 3, and although we have a gas hob we do most of our cooking with a electric grill and oven.
So 28kWh could do us for 2 days, but you wouldn't be driving anywhere afterwards...
Here in Norway, our apartment has just had a new fancy digital meter installed, so we can get variable rates. We are early adopters, but now it looks like everyone will have to switch to variable rate during the next five years.
for i in `facebook friends "=bday" 2>/dev/null | cut -d " " -f 3-`; do facebook wallpost $i "Happy birthday!"; done
0.083 cents/kWh for the first 750 kWh, 0.067 cents/kWh thereafter.
0.083 cents?
0.083 cents(US) is about 0.05 pence (Sterling).
I pay around 23p (~ 37 cents(US)) for the first 720 kWh per year, then about 9p (~14 cents(US)) for the rest, or around 450 times more than your cost above...
All my prices include VAT, please tell me 0.083 cents is after tax???
The US and other militaries have been using this technology for decades in submarines and otherwise... first with motor/generators (since ww2) and then electronics (since the 90s)
Unfortunately these non-innovations are just the type of thing that _do_ get patented, just because some entity decides they want to mass produce them.
The uspto and other ip agencies worldwide need to adopt a crowd-source style public review where the smoke and mirrors can be rendered useless.
Most real new technology was already patented by Tesla 100 years (before its time) ago anyways.
Energy-wise, the average American is a ravenous beast so the average house here draws a lot, as you pointed out. But the average house in Japan is what TFA used as their basis, and their usage habits are much more in line with the scenario above. Due to housing density, city dwellers also don't generally have the physical space to mount a 7.5 kWh generator, which is a large machine that needs outdoor air for intake and exhaust..
During a blackout, you're mindful of the things you need to keep running (indeed, you listed them.) And now, Japan has a lot of problems to deal with, and periodic blackouts are among them. Without space for a generator, the car looks like a pretty good idea.
John
He confused his dollars and cents. In the middle of the U.S. where I live I pay $0.11544 per kWh from June through August. (That's 11.544 cents.) So yes, you still pay three times what we do. But not 450 times more.
My electric co-op also offers a controlled interruptible service plan. For all my heat pump electricity, instead of $0.11544/kWh I pay only $0.0480/kWh year round, but it's hooked to a controller that can interrupt electricity to it during peak seasons or during emergencies. During peak usage periods, they send out a radio signal to everyone's interrupters. Each interrupter shuts off its load for 20 minutes out of each hour. Spread across the thousands of subscribers, they are able to reduce their peak demand during the hottest days of the year. Reducing peak demand means they were able to delay purchasing additional generating capacity, saving the co-op millions of dollars. The "inconvenience" to me is that my house gets a little bit warmer for a few hours on the hottest days. According to my wife, the rise in temperature is indicating the end of the civilized world, but I barely even notice, and for that I think I save about $40 a month on the electric bill in the summer.
John
That's true. I usually spend them clocking an inordinate amount of time on my motorcycle along the country roads out in the boonies. :)
I think people are way underestimating the amount of power a car needs. Pushing a 1ton car up to 60mph is not going to be done with a laptop battery -- esp. with the AC on. (600 laptop batteries, maybe.) 28KWh is actually rather small -- but so's the Leaf. There are addons for the Prius that are 50 to 90 KWh (li-po replacing the NiMH)
At any rate, doing this with a Leaf is rather idiotic. It's just a UPS battery with wheels. And when you've drained the batteries, you no longer have a usable car. And it's actually been done many times before... google "PriUPS". (and the prius has the advantage of a gas engine to (re)charge it's batteries.)
I use a 420W spin drier for 3 minutes to dry my clothes. It's equivalent to the spin cycle on your washing machine, but at 3600RPM. Old designs were 600RPM and new washing machines spin at 900RPM. Polyester comes out wearable, cotton less so. Put your wool garments in a mesh bag to avoid extrusion. Most everything can hang dry in an hour, or tumble dry in 10 minutes.
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Ahhh, thank goodness for that, three times screwed I can cope with. :-)
At 450 times I was considering running a cable from over there...
Do you have to pay tax on electricity?
That's the thing... how much more are you spending to buy that electric car, and how does that compare against buying a $1000 electric generator to power your appliances?
A lot less considering that $1000 generator is 10x the cost and illegal to use or put anywhere due to zoning laws over in Japan.
Of course mentioning anything you use means nothing since you don't live there and so is irrelevant.
Take away your generator and make that comparison again. All the pluses you list simply vanish and go away. And you too will be wishing for a battery to run things for a while.
I'm surprised. Where I live (north-east US) they replaced all the analog meters several years ago with digital ones that included a short-range radio so they could fire most of the meter readers .
Awesome to know this, in fact, if you have a few of them in a row, I wonder just how much energy you could actually generate. would be nice to have some stats of how much they can give back
Do you have a source on this figure? Big LiIon batteries are already more limited by the service of the house/building than by the charging limit of the battery, and the only 10X figure I remember about batteries would be EEStor's ultracapacitors, and to my knowledge they're still vaporware.
I don't read AC A human right
What kind of wash mashines are these? Mine spins at 1800 RPM max, more expensive ones can do 2000.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
So with the PriUPS, he's basically wired an inverter to a car battery? I'm not sure how that's much of an innovation...
Because that might be useful.
He's using the car's traction batteries, not a standard 12v "car battery". The inverters are to take the 360-600VDC down to something the UPS can work with (namely 96VDC.) The R3000XR UPS is an efficient DC switching design that does not use any transformers.
When I am warming the car up in the winter, I hook the tail-pipe up to the dryer vent. The warm exhaust comes in through the laundry room and rises up to the second level bedrooms. It does make our clothes smell a little bit, but warms the house up nicely after an hour or so.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Where in update New York? National Grid offers "SC1C Residential Optional Time of Use" service, which has three different rates (peak, off-peak and shoulder) and also a "Market Rate Service".
http://www.nationalgridus.com/niagaramohawk/home/rates/3_service.asp
No, if you look at his diagram the inverter is hooked to the car's 12V battery which is charged from the traction batteries via another DC-DC converter.
How many of them have cars?
In the UK, you have the option of a single rate, dual rate or three rate meter. If you go for a dual rate, there are two meter dials, and it switches over to the night rate for usually 7 hours per night. If you go for three rate, then you get a separate interruptible circuit with its own meter for use with storage heaters. The electric company switches the circuit on for either a fixed number of hours per day or a variable number of hours based on the weather forecast, at times of its choosing.
0.083 cents per kWh? Either you have very cheap electricity, or you are using Verizon math.
I'd like to be that efficient, but I'm not. I've got almost all CFL's and the top-rated refrigerator. What do you do for:
Heat (any circulator pumps?)
Air conditioning?
Computers (no desktops?)
Cooking - we use propane stove/oven with electric controls. Electric toaster/blender/coffee pot/microwave.
Washing machine (we got the highest-efficiency model available in the size we need)
Clothes dryer (ours is electric, the next will be propane)
Television?
Power tools?
Stereo system?
Pets (fish tank, etc?)
Well pump?
Also, how big is your family?
I can definitely see, by typing this out, how an absolute bill could be reduced to your levels by outsourcing much of the consumption (and consolidating/eliminating toys), but if you're internalizing all that at your rates, for a family, there are solar (off-grid) folks here who will pay top-dollar for your book. :)
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Most likely it's top-loading. They can be a lot more stable than front-loading models - the clothes end up evenly distributed around the edge, while gravity pulls them downwards, so the machine jumps up and down. I had a top-loading spin dryer for a while, but I only used it on the 3KRPM cycle once. My socks came out about three feet long...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
See there: http://priups.com/
Who's diagram? PriUPS.com clearly states he's using the HV battery system; the LV system isn't good for much power.
I was specifically talking about the "Large System A" setup.
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/browse_thread/thread/6cdc99eaaba91855/09eb7f4c973349f2?hl=en#09eb7f4c973349f2
"This essay explain why luxury safer electric (or plug-in hybrid) cars should be free-to-the-user at the point of sale in the USA, and why this will reduce US taxes overall. Essentially, unsafe gasoline-powered automobiles in the USA pose a high cost on society (accidents, injuries, pollution, defense), and the costs of making better cars would pay for themselves and then some. This essay is an example of using post-scarcity ideology to understand the scarcity-oriented ideological assumptions in our society and how those outdated scarcity assumptions are costing our society in terms of creating and maintaining artificial scarcity."
Electrical security is just one more reason. Electric cars can help in balancing renewable energy shifts in a smart grid, too.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Are we looking at the same page?
Actually, night time prices may go DOWN, not up. The night time is significantly under utilized. By getting electric cars on the grid, utilities can afford to put on larger base systems and skip the dispatchable systems (expensive to run, but quick to alter loads). If the utilities can increase the loads, then they can charge lower rates overall.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
All the utilities in the NW US I'm aware of have the option of time-of-use pricing for residential customers. Some still haven't had meters changed out, but the utilities are rapidly catching up.
THat would be either Wyoming (with near 100% coal and low taxes), or Washington or Idaho (with large hydro).
.09 for electricity, though boulder is apparently looking to lower theirs by creating their own electric company. I will say that with Colorado Xcel, if you have an electric car and get the variable rate, it is something like .09 daytime, but .05 nighttime, but they will nail you if you do the charge in the daytime (spike in demand amp will cost you HEAVILY). .
Here in Colorado Xcel we pay
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Though Nissan is I am sure much more competent, collectively.
I want to build an electric utility vehicle (you know, a cross between an ATV and a pickup?) which can power electric tools and equipment.
Perhaps the smartest way to go would be to power it with something that can run off 110 or 220VAC, and put a grid-tie inverter onboard. Then the power converter can do two jobs. When it comes home it just plugs in and voila, it becomes part of the power system. A battery charger connected alongside the inverter would also be necessary.
Too bad inverters are so bloody spendy. I guess if you have a big expensive charger in your house already to handle the integration it doesn't have to cost you much more.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Our gas meters do have the radios now. They're battery powered, though, so I guess they still need a crew.
Dear Lumpy,
You've inspired me.
When I am rich (I don't care if that involves being famous or not), I will make sure that my home has at least the usual kitchen fridge, and a multitude of dedicated freezers, and a kegerator in the home theater, and a kegerator in the office, and a kegerator in the garage. (I will only require one popcorn maker, but I will have a dedicated person to ferry it and its freshly-made popcorn joy to wherever I desire.)
I will also install a tunnel to the garage (thanks for the tip!), but I will not be using Segways to traverse that stretch. Instead, I will install an electric narrow-gauge railroad, powered by catalytic fuel cell fed by the fermented remains of the hand-harvested garden slugs that I will have imported from Spain. There will be a turntable at either end to turn the train 'round, which will be steam operated (just try to find a better actuator than a steam-driven piston!) using geothermal energy.
(All kidding aside: I've installed home theaters, too -- including at a place which had a helipad and a (singular) Porsche in the garage. I found the important amenities to be generally lesser than I have in my own, positively meager, home. But I wouldn't mind having a walk-in freezer and/or a cold room -- it doesn't seem like it'd be very expensive at all, and it would be terribly convenient for everything from storing hanging beef or venison, to dumping heat from a tweaked-out water-cooled PC rig.)
Kid-proof tablet..
and it is coming out as DC. So, convert it to AC, and put it on your lines...you're losing lots of power in transmission and conversion. I never said batteries are dead - what the heck do you think is in the flashlight, pixie dust? A car couldn't handle normal draw for more than a short-term emergency, and during a short-term emergency...you can live off flashlights. That's all I was saying. If the power is out for your block, maybe you should live without an AC for a bit, perhaps. If electricity is out everywhere for a couple weeks, it isn't going to do any good for you to have a running frig when the town itself is dead.
No, we aren't. Anyone who uses the 12V batt is a fool. (or just dmaned lazy... any idiot can go to WalMart, buy an inverter, and plug it into the socket) It's a tiny fraction of the power available from the car. The HV generator is good for ~50Kw; the aux battery is only good for 1Kw.
The fact that you find it difficult to believe is part of the reason that the rest of the world regards you as insanely greedy and wasteful.
Since you've called us 'insanely greedy and wasteful', I'd appreciate a response to my sibling response about your consumption patterns, to see if you're being forthright and conscientious or deceitful and self-righteous.
I'll assume until then that you're single, have your heat and water provided by a source not counted in the bill, buy much of your food out, do your laundry out, etc.
To re-iterate, if that's not true, I really want to learn from your success.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I said most of that in my original post - I do my washing in the house, and use a tumble dryer. Almost all of my food is cooked at home. Heating is gas, that adds about another 50% to my total household energy consumption. Electric heating is insanely wasteful, pretty much no one in the UK uses it except for occasional top-ups (e.g. fan heater in a cold room), and the topic at hand was electricity usage, not total energy usage, so I didn't include that.
If you want to move beyond anecdotes and see some actual statistics, let's look at per capita energy consumption. The US average is about double the UK average, and we're at the high end of consumption for Europe - France and Germany consume less, with a similar standard of living.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Time to turn in your nerd license while you take a refresher EE/power course. Peaking plants, often natural gas burning turbines, are designed to be turned on and off as needed.
There may be idle machinery, but no wasted electrical potential. What do you think all those thousands of power EEs do with their time if not make sure the grid is reasonably efficient?